A Japanese rocket is heading toward Mars today. It's on a historic mission that is scheduled to take five years, and may answer some lingering mysteries about the origins of our solar system.
The Japanese mission aims to reach a milestone no one has ever achieved: a round trip to the Martian orbit.
Plans are for the spacecraft to land not on Mars itself, but on the larger of the planet's two moons, Phobos.
The rocket took off early this morning local time from Kagoshima Prefecture — on the southwestern part of the island of Kyushu.
It’s going to take nearly a year to reach its destination, and will collect data for about three years before returning to earth.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating on the project.
But Japan is leading the mission, which focuses on what has become a specialty of the Japanese space program: returning samples to earth.
In the past, Japan was the first to do that with material from asteroids.
In this case, it will be samples from the moon’s surface.
Among the questions scientists would like to answer is whether the moons of Mars are asteroids that were drawn into the planet’s orbit long ago, or whether they are large fragments from a collision between Mars and another object.
Answers could provide further clues to aspects of Mars itself — and even whether there are elements that could support life.
